The immediate reaction to Tesla Cybertruck on Thursday is that it looks disgusting. But only three days later, after we took a breath, we can begin to read the great transformative message of the cold rolled bulletproof exoskeleton of stainless steel cybertruck. Franz von Holzhausen's design has a context. A quick look back at the architectural movement known as Brutalism shows that cybertruck has a unique goal: eradicate the automotive status quo.
The term brutalism derives from the French term for raw concrete "béton brut". Brutalism was born in Sweden in the late 1940s, picked up by young English architects and brought to life by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, who coined the building. While the name refers to the use of raw concrete, it can be applied to any material presented for its raw beauty - including steel.
What is important now is understanding the philosophy behind brutalism in today's context - as uncompromising honesty and as an impulse to ignore tradition, downiness and conventional bullshit compliance marketing.
The Cybertruck is deliberately ugly. The mood boards in Franz's design studio must be provided with pictures of brutal buildings, many of which were built after the Second World War. "Experimental architecture has prevailed in cities destroyed by endless bombing and fighting," Elle Decor wrote three months ago in an article on the return of brutalism. The goal was "to repopulate entire neighborhoods under a new design vocabulary".
The art book publisher Phaidon published a year ago the atlas of brutalist architecture. The description of brutalist philosophy could easily be translated to the "radical redesign" of automotive technology and automotive design.
There is something to be said for artistic radicalism of any kind. The post-war period, with its urgent need for housing projects and public buildings, made it possible to build elaborate geometric sculptures that did not correspond to any previous architecture. It was a time of radical imagination, a time when the past looked awful. Who wants an architecture that respects tradition, when tradition has led to the extermination camps and Hiroshima? Only the future promised an improvement.
And who wants to return to the respectful tradition of burning? According to Tesla, F-150 combustion does not just have to be electrified but also destroyed in its shape.
Cyberprinting is not the first brutalistic automotive design that targets disruptions.
As Blake Z. Rong, who wrote for Hagerty, said a year ago, the 1980s Citroën Karin took over "the weird component of brutalist aesthetics." He described her as "almost literally a pyramid on wheels, a child's drawing that was brought after him Living at the 1980 Paris Motor Show." The design of the Cybertruck receives the same criticism.
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